I have seen all Internet... Anything...

Don't ask me how i found it, but I find this page on a spam blog strangely haunting. Look at those comments, from folks like "Stinky", "Merlin" and "Bob" all groping around in the same machine-generated dialect of broken English, trying desperately to buy or sell the same nonsense object but apparently unable to connect with one another. They make me think of ghosts.

Odd week

My client had no work at all for me this week. I am not complaining, though. They gave me a lot of work last month, netting me enough money to let me coast a little while. This dovetails well with the fact that I've got a lot of Volity work to do; my timetable gives me another week to put the webclient into its first alpha release. I know just what to do, and it's a joy, but it's still a lot of work. No longer deep in the caves of headless library work, though; I now have enough of a UI built to support rapid, iterative development. Everything looks to be on-time.

For those of you following my webclient adventures, I say with confidence that when you see this shit you're gonna flip out. The first alpha will let you play only one game (tic tac toe) and the table UI will be only half-built (compared to Gamut's) but the game will nonetheless happen in a really-real full Volity environment, and the presence of HTML will help me point out what the cool features are right on the page, much as I did with the Testbench demos a couple of months ago.

Side-note, because I don't think I was explicit about it here before: daerr's discovery that SVG UIs work just fine in my web environment is very very big news, since it means that all current Volity UI work can be ported over to the web client with minimal work. It also means that people attracted to the Volity project because of SVG won't feel disappointed that we're moving away from it - coz we're not. True, HTML+SVG UIs will only work on fully SVG-compliant browsers, which AFAIK means Firefox 2 and Safari 3, but I consider this Perfectly Acceptable.